WOMAN GETS YEAR FOR HARBORING GIRL

St. Paul Pioneer Press (MN)

METRO/REGIONAL BRIEFING

FORT MEYERS, FLA.

An international adoption facilitator who brought a Guatemalan child into the United States to raise her as her own has been sentenced to a year and a day in federal prison.

Mary Bonn, of Naples, Fla., was sentenced Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Fort Myers.

Bonn, formerly of St. Paul, had been the main contact in Guatemala for adoption agencies in Minnesota and other parts of the country.

In 2005, she served as the facilitator for a Washington state couple seeking to adopt a newborn girl, Karen. The girl's adoptive mother flew to the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala to pick her up last year but expressed surprise that she was underweight and malnourished, according to a federal criminal complaint against Bonn.

The woman chose not to immediately finalize the adoption and returned to the U.S. The child then disappeared until a private detective traced her to Bonn's home in December.

Bonn pleaded guilty in July to one count of harboring an illegal immigrant. Her sentence includes two years of probation after her release, a $3,000 fine and $7,000 restitution. Karen has been reunited with her adoptive parents.

-- Frederick Melo